A Postmodernist Reading of Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming”

Noorbakhsh Hooti, Samaneh Shooshtarian

Abstract

As a dramatist, Pinter, more than anyone else in the 20th century, has changed our expectations of the stage language, and has made more tradition treatments of stage, action and language seem ridiculous. He is an enigma to critics. Some consider him an absurdist, others an existentialist and some place him in the group of anti-humanists and the amoral. In this case, Pinter’s drama does not seem irrelevant to postmodern theatre. The power of most of Pinter’s plays originate from the truth of a speaker’s feeling that always lies in the unspoken words or in what has come to be known as “Pinter’s pauses”. His works illustrate the power of language and also its unreliability, what is labeled in postmodernism as “indeterminacy” or “against interpretation”. His uniqueness originates from his ability to create tension between the absurdist tradition with its baffling, purposeless activities and naturalistic use of language which is rendered through believable details. As an example of a postmodern drama The Homecoming seems to display the persistence of the past in the present, indeterminacy, irony, anarchy, happening and silence which are known as the main elements of postmodernism. It is, then, attempted to show that in his depiction of certain aspects of family life and relationships that are common to all families in greater or lesser degree, Pinter’s The Homecoming seems to bring into account a consideration of postmodernity according to Derrida’s concept of “deconstruction”, however, Lyotard’s “Fall of Metanarratives” and “Language Game” are of certain significance within the postmodernist approach towards the play. Finally, it is concluded that all these features together have been the real key to the sense of “fragmentation” and “inconsistency” felt among the play’s family members and have completed the postmodernist environment which is evident within the postmodern plays.Key words: Postmodernist Literature; Postmodernist Feminism; Metanarrative; Language Game; Parody; Difference; Delogocentrism; Indeterminacy

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